The Sky is Far Away: Stories Reviewed By Lois C. Henderson of Bookpleasures.com

Lois C. Henderson

Reviewer Lois
C. Henderson: Lois is a freelance academic editor and back-of-book indexer,
who spends most of her free time compiling word search puzzles for
tourism and educative purposes. Her puzzles are availableHERE and HEREHer Twitter
account (@LoisCHenderson) mainly focusses on the toponymy of British
place names. Please feel welcome to contact her with any feedback at
LoisCourtenayHenderson@gmail.com.

The Sky
is Far Away: Stories is a truly eclectic collection of short stories
that have taken two decades, in all, to write, and which cross the
generations in terms of the protagonists involved. The tales are
deeply grounded in human experience and pathos, as well as in a
profound desire to plumb the depths of the human psyche and soul. The
author of several novels, including, most recently, Now I Say Goodbye
to You and Yellow Sky, Brooks Wright has a sound grasp on the very
essence of humanity, realizing that our strengths lie in our
confronting, and mastering, our own vulnerabilities.

The
collection is extremely moving, and has, at its central core, the
willingness to be subject to, and moved by, the most deep-seated
empathy. Not that Wright’s style is at all elevated in tone, but in
its very down-to-earthness, and in its grasping of the significance
and the underlying meaning of the everyday, he superbly crafts what
might else be ordinary action into extraordinary events. The humility
of his tone grabs the reader in its practicality and pragmatism,
making one feel that one, too, has been in a similar situation, yet
what he renders of the immediate, at times, verges on the realms of
magical realism.

Wright’s
ability to transcend gender boundaries empowers him to write equally
well from the female perspective as from the male, an example of such
being the way in which, in “Celestial Navigation,” he describes a
young woman’s attempt to heal the shattered fragments of a family
that is at odds with itself. Katey’s budding womanhood and innate
strength and capability are succinctly and poignantly described: “Her
hands gripped the sides [of a broken bowl], tenderly, as though she
were holding something helpless and small.”

The
cross-cultural impetus of Wright’s writing can be seen in his
ability to describe the thinking of those from other cultures, which
is perhaps strange to the conventional mind, such as when, in “The
Spillway”, an Afghan elder intimates that President Bush provide
his daughters in marriage to the members of his tribe as recompense
for the accidental killing of members of his own extended family by
the United States forces. The ostensibly ‘reasonable’ and
seemingly rational Western mindset is pivotally poised against the
patriarchal system of tradition and custom that pervades the Middle
East: “I find this slightly incredulous notion a lesson in history
to strengthen their bargaining position, that we expect will be
followed by a more reasonable though well-deserved demonstration of
outrage at what our country has done in the name of...what?”

Small
wonder to find that such a writer is currently working on a memoir of
his older brother, Bruce Wright, whose naked shot by the famed
photographer, Diane Arbus, has gained international recognition as “A
naked man being a woman.” Brooks Wright work is definitely worth
exploring and discussing at some depth, both for the symbolism of its
subject matter, and for the imaginative voice that it affords the
marginalized and the dispossessed―that, too, is an element that he
shares with Arbus.